Where am I? is the first demand the wailing infant makes of the world he arrives in. Calmed and comforted, you stop asking after a while, and are soon so adjusted to reality (an adult invention) that you forget the question. I continued, inconveniently and unappeasably, to ask it in Tasmania. I remember a Sunday afternoon when I must have been four or five years old. My parents had taken me to a gymkhana at the agricultural showground near our house. From up there, on the dusty raised race-track, you could see the closed circle of our world: Mount Wellington to one side, to the other—behind the loops of bitumen and the bright weatherboard cartons of our suburb, set down on a hill only a few months before—glum, hunched Mount Direction; the choppy waters of our bay with its rank mud-flats, the frayed grass of the rifle range, the smoking skyline which was the zinc works. A northerly wind whipped up small tornadoes of grit. The sky, overcast and opaque, stifled the scene as if beneath glass. There were cheers from the track: someone or other had won a race. Wandering through the sparse crowd holding my father’s hand, I began suddenly, inexplicably to cry. I remember the heat of the tears, and my gasping for breath in order to wail some more. My parents were mystified, embarrassed, finally annoyed. What was the reason? they asked. I was too busy bellowing to say. They were with another couple, who also had an only son. He too looked on, aghast at the exhibition. ‘Graeme isn’t crying,’ they pointed out. Well, no, of course he’s not, I suppose I thought; how could he be? The tantrum was my own exclusive means of self-expression. My parents had no choice but to bundle me home, their day ruined; and I think they were a little suspicious of me ever after, afraid of the inordinate demands I’d make on life, and of the dissatisfaction and frustration dramatised by my outburst on the showground.
My silly fit of misery in the grey afternoon repeated that first cry of the displaced infant. Where am I? it insisted on knowing. The mountains told me that I was in Tasmania, which only made things worse. This was not the life I wanted; somehow I’d been given the wrong one. My tears raged at the injustice—or incompetence—of it.
What continued to terrify me was the rawness, the shivering vulnerability of the place. A settlement had happened here by chance, in a landscape which didn’t recognise it. Our suburb was knocked into shape yesterday. The families allotted to the wooden boxes eyed each other warily over their back fences, while their children threw pebbles and abuse in the street. The yards were quagmires; all the trees which grew here had been flattened, and replaced by saplings. It would take a long while for the world to acquire upholstery, the soothing sense that it has been made ready for us to inhabit. Rain played the iron roof like a kit of drums at night; mornings began with visits to a shed in the backyard, and once a week the night-cart toiled round the streets and a dunny man—as we sat inside pretending not to notice—lumbered up the path with our can of soil on his shoulder. Only much later were pipes laid in the yard, and we got a potted cataract inside the house. Our country cousins made a point of trying it out when they visited, giggling as the cascade gushed.
In the thirty years since those early days, centuries have passed. The place has lived down its provisional look, its unaccommodated feel. My parents, remaining in the house, have achieved a humble miracle of colonisation. The churned waste is now a flower garden. Their pride in it, and their hard-working devotion to it, make it their thing of beauty, created to mark the spot where rude nature gives way to nurture. In every letter they report on what they have planted, or what’s in bloom. They make sacrifices for its sake, and won’t have a dog because it would dig up the beds. The house has changed as well. Its weatherboards suggested temporariness; onto them has been grafted a second skin of craggy artificial brick. Once more, the early history of the land is reprised here: the house’s new carapace repeats the colony’s advance from wattle and daub to buildings of stone. What used to be the chicken coop also has a covering of left-over Quickbrick, and inside it a standard lamp with an art deco bowl like an overgrown ashtray—unfashionable, discarded—occupies the dirt floor where the chooks used to roost. Indoors, everything is clad, cushioned, supplied with a buffer against reality. The lounge-chairs have antimacassars, the video-recorder wears a leather coverlet at night like the cloth you drape on a cage so the bird inside will go to sleep; in the toilet, a spare roll on the cistern hides up the fluffy crinoline of a doll, who cheerily waves her plastic mitt. The world has been upholstered with a vengeance. The letter box propped on the front fence is a cottagey miniature of the house itself, carpentered by my father: an aedicule for the fantasy to curl up in.
There is no need any longer to be afraid, to feel exposed. Still, just outside this haven lurks the sense of destitution—of having been abandoned here—which started me crying at the showground. Across the highway, I walked through the grounds of the primary school, which opened the year I began there. Though the blinds were drawn and the buildings closed for the summer holidays, it was all as I remembered—loud-speakers on the roof-tops to bark commands; the flagpole, a snarled wire snapping from it, where we had to line up in paramilitary rows; on the blistered tarmac, the ruled insignia of team-playing: boxes for hopscotch, goals for football. On a window, someone had scrawled ‘Fuck my bum’ in excrement. Down a grassy slope, beside the special school for retardees, two dozen car tyres painted white have been planted up to their middles in earth and organised into dwarfish avenues and turning circles—an imaginary roadway, where the unbalanced children could be taught to ride bicycles. The past waited here to take me prisoner. This—the asphalt playground with its compulsory squares, the rubbery buried road going nowhere—was what I had run away from. Seen from school, the street on which our house stood ran to the steep top of a hill and then, its gravel glaring, dived like a ski-jump into nothing; after it there was the barrier of Mount Direction, in its olive drab camouflage. I refused to believe that the world stopped here so prematurely.
Through my bedroom window I could see a cabin behind the house next door. A hanger-on of the family has occupied it for years, tolerated in the unkempt rubbly yard but not allowed in the house. Since I left home, he has had two strokes and a heart attack; he passes the time by drinking, and allegedly killed off some berries my parents were growing by his habit of peeing through the paling fence. In summer he wears a white singlet, in winter a cardigan red as his face, with always a pair of emerald-green bell-bottoms. Every day when I was back I’d see him through the open door of his hut, sitting bent forward and cradling his head in his hands, beneath a row of kitchen utensils hooked on the fibre-board wall. The cricket score drawled from the radio, or sitcom laughter cackled at him from his television set in a corner. A few yards off, out my window and over the fence, quiet desperation squatted in its box. Moving only when he lit himself another cigarette or refilled his glass or tottered to the fence for a pee, he was an image of resignation to the awaited end. My protest was against such a terminus.
Busy imagining the beyond, lying awake at night and dreaming of the lighted world which hung around the curve of the globe above us, I paid less and less attention to Tasmania itself. Since I never saw the rest of the state, except for a day-trip to Launceston at the top of the island when I was twelve, I could easily deny it, or behave as if it didn’t impinge on me—as if I were merely serving a term here, doing time like the convicts, in the hope that good behaviour might ensure parole. Mentally I left very early, though the body had to wait much longer before it could follow. Once I began to read, I discovered somewhere else to live: the Noddyland or Neverland or wonderland or secret garden of English books. Art even at its most naive could colonise the hostile world; it freed you from facts by inventing alternatives. Thus I became unassuageably homesick for a place I had never seen, which existed only in writing. That fantasy was my home.
Near us there was a house exactly like ours—the government department which built these suburbs had only a limited set of prototypes—except that its front porch displayed a plank of polished Huon pine with an inscription branded in by pokerwork. The board said EMOHRUO. It puzzled me for a long time when I was a child. An aboriginal incantation? The family name of some clan of what we called new Australians—Greek perhaps? I decoded it eventually, and as I grew up it became a curio of suburban kitsch for me, along with black swans preening in wrought iron and bulbous plastic tomatoes whose stalks squirted ketchup. Now it has turned back into a puzzle. Why, if you’re bent on announcing to passers-by that this is your home, would you choose to do so backwards? Was the title reversed out of shyness? Did the sense of belonging fear to declare itself directly, in dread of rejection? Was there a superstitious obscurantism to the name, as if the spirits of place spoke a dialect which isn’t ours? Or maybe it uttered an exotic yearning. The sign uprooted the house which it should have fixed on that lawn of concrete; it gestured towards some Polynesian island.
Today when I walk past, the back-to-front babble resounds with all the first pushy improbability of homesteading in this country. It’s the act of bravado which requisitions space and stakes a personal claim; it spells out in morale-boosting plural the collective need to imagine a home, and thereby reminds me of what I can never have. But by its nonsensicality—no more or less absurd than calling these streets Glenorchy, or nicknaming this funny forgotten realm Taswegia, as we used to do at school—it concedes defeat in advance. Our home garbles its own name, renders itself unreadable and unattainable.
